The Encyclopedia Americana (1920)/Das Kätchen von Heilbronn
DAS KÄTCHEN VON HEILBRONN
(‘Katie of Heilbronn’). This romantic drama
by Bernt Heinrich von Kleist, first produced in
1810, long remained one of the favorities in
German theatrical repertory. It is the most
romantic work of its author, himself
perhaps the most romantic of Germany's
poet-dramatists, and is a representative product
of ‘Storm and Stress’ in individual and
national life. Goethe, who was director of
the theatre at Weimar when it was written,
refused, at first, to present it, calling it “a
jumble of sense and nonsense,” and an abstract
criticism of the play amply justifies his judgment.
Yet the work has undeniable charm and
merit in spite of its faults, or perhaps because
of them, since its very exaggeration of romance
in situation, characterization and poetic fervor
is what has given it its vogue. The quick
shifts from darkness to light, from verse to
prose, the contrast between the luminous
Kätchen who sacrifices everything for love and
her wicked rival Kunigunde are typical of
Kleist, both of his work and of his life. He
himself called “Kätchen von Heilbronn” the
obverse of “Penthesilea,” the Amazon-feminist
heroine of an earlier play, “her opposite pole, a
creature as powerful through submission as
Penthesilea is through action.” It is as a type
like Griselda that Kätchen survives, not as a
story, for the tale of her blind devotion to Graf
Wetter von Strahl, of the intrigue and mystery
and treachery that bar her path and of her final
emergence as a lost Kaisers-tochter are too
well-worn for distinction.